While she was speaking, Lily tore open the only interesting letter among the dozen. Quietly she read it to herself. When she had finished she interrupted Madame Gigon.
“I have a letter from M. de Cyon,” she said, “about some furniture I was selling. He writes that Madame is ill again with indigestion ... quite seriously this time.”
Madame Gigon made a little grunting noise. “Nadine eats too much.... I have told her so a dozen times but she will not listen. A woman as fat as that....”
And from the superior pinnacle of her great age, Madame allowed the sentence to trail off into unspeakable vistas of Madame de Cyon’s folly. At the end of a long time during which they both sat silently in the dripping quiet of the summer evening Madame Gigon said explosively, “She will go off suddenly one of these days ... like that,” and she snapped her finger weakly.
At the sound Criquette and Michou got up lazily, stretched themselves, and waddled close to her chair. For a moment she scratched their heads with groping fingers and then turning to Lily said, “It is time for their milk.... And see to it, my child, that they have a little cream in it.”
Lily rose and called the dogs inside the lodge. Across the river in the tiny church, the old curé, M. Dupont, rang the vesper bell. Behind the cropped willows along the Marne the last glow faded above the rolling fields of wheat. Inside the house Lily was singing softly, “O, le coeur de ma mie est petit, tous p’tit, p’tit.” There was no other sound.
Presently, Madame Gigon leaned back in her bed and called to Lily. “To-morrow,” she said, “you might ask M. Dupont to call on me. It has been two days since he was here.”
LXXI
UPON Germigny l’Evec, removed from the highroad and the railway, the war descended at first slowly, with the unreality of a vague dream, and then with a gathering, ponderous ferocity of an appalling nightmare. In the beginning even the farmer and his men, familiar with the army and with military service, could not believe it. Still there was the memory of 1870, said the pessimists. It was not impossible.
“Ah, but war is unthinkable,” said Lily to Madame Gigon. “The days of war are over. It could not happen. They would not dare to permit it.”